The full truth in cop's killing

The death of a police officer is always tragic. That tragedy is compounded when "friendly fire" is part of the equation.
But the tragedy when one cop accidentally shoots another during the heat of battle doesn't justify officials hiding facts from the public. Nor does embarrassment. Nor does natural empathy for the officer who hit his colleague.
Make no mistake, the friendly-fire shot that hit 32-year-old Orange Detective Kieran Shields was not the one that killed him on Aug. 7, 2006. The fatal blast came from Raynard Brown, a 20-year-old with a long criminal record.

In the year and a half since Shields was killed, the Essex County Prosecutor's Office and Orange police never publicly mentioned the friendly fire from another officer, nor that the second officer's pistol jammed -- extremely dangerous for a cop caught in a life-or-death fight.
Shields' family, a grand jury and "all the proper authorities," in the words of a spokesman for the prosecutor, were "eventually" told about the second officer's shot. But the public wasn't, and that's a problem.
First, some of the issues involved in the case could be important in preventing similar problems in the future -- if they're known. Second, there's the question of credibility.
The Essex County Prosecutor's Office this week contended it did not know in the first days after the incident that Shields was struck by friendly fire. That may be true for Paula Dow, the prosecutor. But plenty of cops and Dow's staff knew. Investigators knew right away that the other officer's gun had been fired at the scene. And investigators knew from an autopsy the day after the shooting that Shields had been hit by a bullet in addition to the two blasts from Brown's shotgun. Dow also acknowledges she heard "early on" that friendly fire may have been involved.
Dow says there is no requirement to disclose all the circumstances of an investigation. But silence on such an important part of the shooting of a police officer, broken only after a news account in The Star-Ledger, undermines the credibility of the prosecutor's office.
Failing to acknowledge friendly fire does nothing to help prevent such accidents from occurring in the future.
Officials also still aren't saying whether the jamming of the second officer's gun at a very bad time was a freak occurrence or an indication of a wider weapons problem.
Such questions deserve answers. And the public deserves the full truth in every case.